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INTERVIEW
Transformative Marketing: An Interview with Professor V. Kumar, Ph.D Marketing at St. John’s University (NYC) and CEO of the IMC Institute
BY STEPHEN SHAW
I STEPHEN SHAW is the Chief Strategy Officer of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in delivering a more unified customer experience. Stephen can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca
❱ DMN.CA
n 1960 the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing published a landmark article by a Pillsbury executive named Robert Keith titled The Marketing Revolution. In a succinct 4-pages Keith chronicled the evolution of marketing at Pillsbury from the founding of the company in 1869. The point of the history lesson was that Keith had concluded that business was undergoing a radical change in philosophy that would transform marketing from a peripheral role to become a “dominant function”. He stated that “Companies revolve around the customer, not the other way around”, and that “As the concept gains ever greater acceptance, marketing is emerging as the most important single function in business”. Pillsbury’s new purpose, he announced, was no longer to simply make and sell baking products but to “satisfy the needs and desires, both actual and potential, of our customers”. The Marketing Department, up until then limited to managing advertising, would “direct and control” all of the processes that took its products from the assembly line to market. Newly created brand managers would have full accountability for the P&L of each product. Keith’s prediction was not inherently revolutionary — the legendary management consultant Pete Drucker had said much the same thing six years before, declaring that “There is only valid definition of business purpose: to create a satisfied customer”,
and that “the business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation”. But for most businesses, marketing was still largely associated with “pushing” products into stores so they could be sold. The idea that marketing, as a central controlling function, could become a business driver was farfetched given its narrow mandate at the time. Soon after Keith’s article appeared, many prominent marketing academics came forward to make a similar case — most notably, the renowned Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt who that same year wrote his famous HBR article titled “Marketing Myopia”, saying that “to continue growing, companies must ascertain and act on their customers’ needs and desires, not bank on the presumptive longevity of their products.” Keith’s so-called revolution turned out, in the end, to be short-lived. For a while, marketing did rise to prominence as a strategic function, involved in every aspect of product development and commercialization. But that is certainly not the case today. Marketing’s role has shrunk in importance, reduced to JULY 2022
